This year’s festival will be opened by the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, and will be dedicated to Vietnamese journalist and activist Pham Doan Trang, who has been detained for several months in her country, and to the General Secretary of the Trinidad and Tobago Domestic Workers’ Union, Ida Leblanc, who will receive an award.
Guests will include American whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who will talk about the human rights implications of digital data. Her 35-year prison sentence was commuted by a court martial, after she relayed hundreds of thousands of confidential military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks. A situation that still earns WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange the threat of 175 years in prison in the USA.
American abortion rights activist Paxton Smith, World Trade Organization (WTO) Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi will also be taking part. Another symbol of the festival’s commitment to women and minorities is the fact that half of the 30 or so films presented were directed by women.
China will also be a central theme of the festival, with the presence of activist and former Hong Kong parliamentarian Nathan Law. So did a Uighur survivor, at a time when Beijing is being targeted by many governments, including Switzerland, for holding over a million representatives of this minority in internment camps. Discussions on the children of jihadists in Syria or ecocide are also planned.
